


new ways to fall apart

by paperclipbitch



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s07e02 Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, F/M, i found this on my laptop and it's not shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:14:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riddell worries, sometimes, that she'll go home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	new ways to fall apart

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, I was backing up my harddrive because I dropped a bunch of nail pearls into my laptop mechanisms and had to take it to be fixed, and I found this from sometime last year, and I don't hate it!
> 
> So: ficlet about Riddell and Nefertiti.

They could go home, but they don’t.

Admittedly, it is a little more difficult for Nefertiti to go home than it is for Riddell; he’s told her about London, though, about his country house and his club and his vast collection of dinner jackets, and she responded by cocking an eyebrow and stealing his brandy from his hand. 

“Other women would be impressed by all that, you know,” he reminded her, though he didn’t mind in the least, and watched the way the firelight glinted off her laugh.

“I am a queen,” she reminded him, and handed him back the brandy glass, emptied.

Nefertiti doesn’t back down from a challenge, doesn’t scare easily, and doesn’t ever blink. She does occasionally point out the futility of hunting and refuses to be impressed no matter what he prepares to shoot next, and his ammunition has gone suspiciously missing on more than one occasion, but sometimes, at night, she lies beside him and points up at the stars and tells him stories about Isis, who is the sky.

Riddell worries, sometimes, that she’ll go home. That one morning she’ll wake up and realise that she should go back to ruling _Ancient Egypt_ , to slaves and sycophants and sand, and the Doctor will come back to help her, and then he’ll be left alone in his tent. That it will just be him and a gun and the silence he used to love.

Until then, though, there’s the two of them and the tent and the stars.

-

“You told me once that you’d put me over your knee,” Nefertiti breathes. They have lantern light in the tent, glittering off the dark hair falling around her shoulders, and her eyes are sharp and half-shadowed. 

Riddell moves his mouth soundlessly, lips dry. The night is overwhelmingly humid; there will be rains tomorrow, he thinks, but for now his shirt is sticking to him, his lungs feel constricted, and he can feel moisture gathering in his elbows, his knees, the small of his back, the nape of his neck. 

Nefertiti arches an eyebrow, the one that means she expects an answer. She won’t ask for it, but she doesn’t need to.

“I did,” he agrees, voice cracking just a little. “But I didn’t-”

His excuses, that he didn’t know better then, didn’t know her then, fade out when her lips purse just slightly. 

Nefertiti might be out of her own time, her own country, her own empire, but that doesn’t mean she’s stopped being a queen. Even in a loose shirt and trousers he would have found scandalous before all of this, she looks every bit the regent. She may not have thousands of loyal subjects, but she has him, and she seems perfectly content with that.

_He_ is perfectly content with that, and the realisation might startle him except that it’s been obvious since she turned to the Doctor and said that perhaps she wouldn’t return to Egypt right away.

“What about now?” she asks, something mischievous in the quirk of her lips.

What he would do now bears no resemblance to what he suggested then; he wanted to tame her, then, and it was perhaps the stupidest thing he would ever think of. You can’t tame Nefertiti, and you shouldn’t want to. 

“I’ll do whatever you want,” spills from Riddell’s mouth, clumsy and inelegant and completely at odds with her teasing tone.

Something softens in her expression, and she slips into his lap, smelling of flowers and skin and sunshine. “I know, my dear,” she whispers, and seals the declaration with her teeth in his lower lip.


End file.
